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Safe, Efficient Garbage Collection for C++ John R. Ellis and David L. Detlefs Safe, Efficient Garbage Collection for C++ John R. Ellis and David L. Detlefs* CSL-93-4 September 1993 [P93-00018] Copyright @ 1993 by Digital Equipment Corporation and Xerox Corporation This work may not be copied or reproduced in whole or in part for any commercial purpose. Permission to copy in whole or in part without payment of fee is granted for nonprofit educational and research purposes provided that all such whole or partial copies include the following: a notice that such copying is by permission of the Systems Research Center of Digital Equipment Corporation and the Palo Alto Research Center of Xerox Corporation, both in Palo Alto, California; an acknowledgment of the authors and individual contributors to the work; and all applicable portions of the copyright notice. Copying, reproducing, or republishing for any other purpose shall require a license with payment of fee to the Systems Research Center and Xerox. All rights reserved. CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: 0.3.3 Dynamic storage management [Programming Languages], 0.3.4 Processors [Programming Languages] General terms: garbage collection, storage management, languages Additional Keywords and Phrases: debugging, safety, C++ * Systems Research Center, Digital Equipment Corporation Xerox Corporation XEROX Palo Alto Research Center 3333 Coyote Hill Road Palo Alto, California 94304 Abstract We propose adding safe, efficient garbage collection to C++, eliminating the possibility of storage-management bugs and making the design of complex, object-oriented systems much easier. This can be accomplished with almost no change to the language itself and only small changes to existing implementations, while retaining compatibility with existing class libraries. Our proposal is the first to take a holistic, system-level approach, integrating four technologies. The language intelface specifies how programmers access garbage collection through the language. An optional safe subset of the language automatically enforces the safe-use rules of garbage collection and precludes storage bugs. A variety of collection algorithms are compatible with the language interface, but some are easier to implement and more compatible with existing C++ and C implementations. Finally, code- generator safety ensures that compilers generate correct code for use with collectors. John R. Ellis and David L. Detlefs Contents 1. Introduction ...